Technologies, Worlds, Politics

Goldsmiths researchers investigate how people actively create and politically engage with technologies to (re)make societies.

Research theme overview

Technologies such as smartphones, internet media and communications, or nuclear power stations are often talked about as tools or instruments. In contrast, this research theme critically investigates technologies as not separate from but mediums, devices, and crafted things that people act in relation to and through which they creatively, actively and politically (re)make societies, polities, and environments.

Through our three streams we ask questions such as: Are existing human rights norms able to meet the consequences of internet processes that bypass human oversight or forms of accountability? How do people (re)create social and cultural relations and at the same time challenge emerging power relations through their engagement with digital technologies? How do people mobilise art and technologies to demand environmental justice?

Champion quote

Evelyn RuppertTheme Champion

"People are not passive but active in shaping their relations to technologies and the (re)making of worlds"

Evelyn is a Professor in the Department of Sociology. Her work focuses on how digital technologies and data can powerfully shape and have consequences for who we are and how we are known and governed. She asks questions about the ways in which digital data has become an object of power and explores how citizens critically intervene in its deployment as an object of knowledge. She is co-author (with Engin Isin) of Being Digital Citizens and co-editor (with John Law) of Modes of Knowing.